German critic attacks Turner prize winner

British critics have queued up to praise her work but yesterday Tomma Abts - the German-born winner of the 2006 Turner prize - was attacked by her country's leading art critic, who said her paintings looked like east German "wallpaper".

In a review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's respected broadsheet, Niklas Maak said he was baffled by the jury's decision to give Abts, 38, the £25,000 prize on Monday night.

Abts had virtually no profile in Germany, he said, adding that her paintings looked "like pattern samples from an old German Democratic Republic wallpaper factory". They were, he added, little more than "elegant lurchings".

Mr Maak told the Guardian that he had nothing against Abts, but said her work - championed by the Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle for its "modesty", "inwardness" and "fixatedness" - was not very original, as the constructivists and neo-constructivists had done it earlier and better. "She is a very good designer. It's lovely wallpaper. But it isn't really art," he said.

The German gallery that exhibits Abts' tiny abstract paintings defended her work yesterday. Giti Nourbakhsch gallery in Berlin said it had a long waiting list because of her art. The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called her "the new star of the international art scene".